Monday, October 26, 2015

Are there any Catholics celebrating Nostra Aetate?

It is my great privilege, as President of B’nai B’rith International,
to thank you sincerely for your generous hospitality today. Like our
interactions with your esteemed predecessors, our visit – as a
delegation of B’nai B’rith representatives from cities across multiple
continents – is meant to celebrate and affirm our organization’s
profound investment in inter-communal relations, and particularly in the
Catholic-Jewish friendship, at all levels in the more than 50 countries
where B’nai B’rith maintains a grassroots presence.

B’nai B’rith, founded nearly 172 years ago by German Jewish
immigrants to the United States, is the oldest Jewish communal,
humanitarian and human rights advocacy organization. Our heritage is
one, rooted in the millennia of Jewish history, of dynamic civil-society
engagement in promoting service and fraternity both within the Jewish
community and in relations between diverse communities.

The contemporary blossoming of an exceptional Christian-Jewish bond,
enabled in substantial part by the contributions of the Second Vatican
Council document “Nostra Aetate” fifty years ago, is thus a source of
immense satisfaction and hope for us. No less, this continuing,
extraordinary transformation in the relationship between our faith
communities can serve as a source of inspiration and optimism for so
many others around the world, not least at a time of tensions and
conflicts too often informed by religion. In order to make this
possible, we must make the deepening Christian-Jewish kinship further
known among our own adherents around the world – from clergy to
educators to young people – and we must progress from dialogue to
concrete partnership in tackling the array of challenges that confront
our constituencies and all members of the human family. Among these are
the protection of our shared environment, care for the poorest and most
vulnerable in society, the advancement of quality education for all, the
encouragement of international peace, and the combating of all forms of
extremism and bigotry.

In this vein, we thank you for the important contributions that you
have already made during your pontificate. And as representatives of the
Jewish community – and of an organization whose branch in Argentina was
honored to consider you a beloved partner during your tenure in Buenos
Aires – we specifically acknowledge you for advancing the path of your
predecessors in signaling the Church’s commitment to the Jewish people,
its respect for Judaism, its denunciation of persisting antisemitism,
and its due recognition of the State of Israel. In turn, B’nai B’rith
and the broad spectrum of the Jewish community extend love and support
to our Christian friends worldwide – and we specifically offer our
immense concern, and abiding solidarity, as Christians in so many parts
of the Middle East are now faced with discrimination, threats and
outright persecution. We have them in our thoughts and our prayers.

This acute mindfulness, however, is not merely a reflection of the
Jewish duty to love our fellows as ourselves, and of the genuine
severity of too many Christians’ circumstances. After all, particularly
in the Middle East, Jews’ and Christians’ status as vulnerable
minorities makes it imperative to recognize the common difficulties that
our co-religionists bear in the very region where our faiths were born.
The region’s complexity is self-evident. One thing, though, is clear: A
violent fanaticism, rooted in theological convictions but manifested in
political forms, poses a grave, persistent threat to the very lives of
those whose existence it opposes. The international community is rightly
aghast at the brutal path of the so-called Islamic State. At the same
time, we continue to contend with the policies of the Iranian regime,
the Islamic Republic. If it weren’t enough that Iran openly pledges
Israel’s destruction and lethally empowers foremost terrorist groups –
responsible for carnage as far away as Buenos Aires, whose unresolved
1994 AMIA bombing you have consistently highlighted – this most
dangerous of governments has aggressively pursued the ability to acquire
the most dangerous of weaponry. With the latest deadline in
negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program approaching, more attention
needs to be paid to the telling fact that Iran’s actions have broadly
united its neighbors – Arabs and Israelis alike – in urgent, and
unprecedented, alarm.

An Iranian ability to obtain nuclear weaponry would prove an
unparalleled impediment to international security, and it certainly
would make regional peace all the more elusive. Accordingly, it remains
so vital – and a matter of simple honesty – to recognize that addressing
violent extremists is key to enabling greater stability and coexistence
in the Middle East. Not least, tragically, no enduring
Palestinian-Israeli peace can be possible as long as powerful forces
deny the right of a Jewish state to live within any boundaries in Jews’
only ancestral homeland. It is in light of this that it is so important
that Palestinians not be afforded incentives to pursue political aims
outside of meaningful and direct negotiations, compromise and
comprehensive bilateral agreement with Israel. Moreover, it is in light
of Israel’s perseverance as a remarkable democracy in singularly trying
conditions that we discern a perversion of ethics in a United Nations
record condemning Israel more than all other countries, and in an
economic warfare movement, present even in some religious denominations,
that singles out the Jewish state for punitive campaigns. After all,
Israel is the rare site in the Middle East of minority populations,
Muslims and Christians alike, continuously growing. Devastatingly, far
more life has been lost in only four years of strife in Syria than in
almost seven decades of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Your Holiness, the delicacy of these issues is not lost on us, while
their gravity weighs heavily indeed. The suffering of so many in our
world is immense, and the potential for despondency very real. However,
as a people that has faced innumerable challenges – and survived them
all, by the grace of God – we know that the course of history cannot be
reduced to the product of one moment’s set of circumstances; history
unfolds in unexpected ways. As people of faith, we are confident that
better times await, and we are committed to helping realize that future
for all. And as a people blessed with true friends, not least among the
world’s Catholics, we thank God that we are not alone in seeking
harmony, justice and peace.